Hands-on: Kindle books finally come to the Mac desktop

Readers have long been able to read their Kindle books on actual Kindles, …

Amazon's Kindle software for Mac has finally arrived, a hair over six months after its Windows counterpart. The free application allows Mac users to read books from the Kindle Store on their desktops and sync their items across other devices, including actual Kindles, iPhones, BlackBerrys, or Windows machines using the Kindle software. Since we gave the PC version a (semi-successful) run through, we thought we would take a look at Kindle for Mac as well.

Once you download the software and log in with your Amazon account, the Kindle software presents you with an essentially blank "Home" screen and an "Archived Items" tab. If you have already downloaded books to read on other devices (I'm an active Kindle 2 user, for example, so I have plenty of books already), then the Archived Items tab should be filled with everything you have ever bought.

In order to read any of these books, you must download them to your Home. Do this by right-clicking on a title and selecting "Add to Home" in the contextual menu. The download shouldn't take long—most of mine downloaded within seconds—before it's available for you to read. If your other Kindle devices sync your notes, bookmarks, and last read status with the cloud, all of those things should be synced here as well. This means you should be able to pick up where you last left off on your iPhone, for example, or see the notes and highlights you made on your Kindle.

Fortunately, we had much more success here in downloading our books than we did when we tried out the Windows version of the software (likely due to the server issues being fixed). As such, we were actually able to read a book! Unfortunately, because it's a book, there's not much more to report from there—the software displays books in black text on a white background and you can navigate between pages by using your keyboard's arrow keys or by scrolling on your mouse. Like on the Kindle (device), you can adjust the size of the text within the software and change the number of words per line.

Syncing books you have already purchased isn't the only purpose of the software, though—you can also purchase and read free samples of new books. Clicking the "Shop in Kindle Store" button will take you to the Kindle Store in your Web browser, where you can look through the selections just like you would on Amazon.com. If you want to download a free sample, there's a button on the right hand side of the page that says "Send sample now." You'll be forced to choose a device to send it to:

...and it should begin downloading in your software within seconds. The one problem we ran into here was when we clicked a button from the Kindle Store in Safari saying to send us to Kindle for Mac on the desktop, which ended up trying to open our virtual machine with Windows installed so that it could open the software there instead.

If the book hasn't synced quickly enough to your desktop, there's a "Sync and check for new items" option under the Actions menu within the application. When your sample is finally downloaded, it will display on your Home screen, clearly marked as a sample with a "Buy Now" button next to it for easy purchasing when you're done evaluating the sample. And, of course, if you choose to buy the book from the desktop, you can then sync it to your other Kindle-capable devices as well.

As we said during our hands-on with Kindle for PC, the software works largely as expected, though you still can't read any magazine or blog subscriptions on your PC like you can on the actual Kindle. This is largely a nonissue for blogs—if you're on the computer already, just read them in the browser or in your RSS reader. As for magazines or newspapers, there's no saying how that may change for Amazon's—or anyone's—software once the iPad comes out.

Speaking of which, Amazon's announcement Thursday included a reference to a soon-to-be iPad version of the Kindle software. Whether this will differ from the already existing version of Kindle for iPhone OS (which will be able to run on the iPad by default) remains to be seen, but an iPad-specific version of the software will certainly be welcome to those who have already invested in Kindle books and aren't yet ready to start using Apple's own iBookstore.